Have your say on our healthy lifestyles service
Gloucestershire County Council wants to hear your views on their proposed changes to the healthy lifestyle service.
As part of the council’s legal duty to improve the health and wellbeing of local people and reduce health inequalities, they provide a healthy lifestyles service that supports people to make changes like quitting smoking or losing weight.
The current contract comes to an end in March 2024 and the council wants to hear your feedback on their proposed changes for the new service starting on 1 April 2024.
Since the healthy lifestyles service was first put in place in 2017, there has been an increase in lifestyles support available to every adult in the county including the NHS digital weight management programme and the Community Wellbeing Service.
With this in mind, the council is proposing to change the weight management offer (currently a referral to Slimming World) to more bespoke, targeted support for those people who find it most difficult to benefit from mainstream services. The aim is to continue to work with community organisations to deliver personalised support alongside activities already available in their local community.
It was announced in September that £3.6 million would be invested into a separate bespoke service for children and families, as recent data shows a significant increase in the number of young people that have obesity since the start of the pandemic. Without intervention, childhood obesity tends to carry on into adulthood and can cause serious health complications like heart disease and diabetes. The support for children is therefore not part of this consultation.
Cllr Mark Hawthorne, leader of Gloucestershire County Council said: “Our current healthy lifestyles service already does a great job – the results for the stop smoking programme are some of the best in the country. This is an opportunity to build on what has worked well to deliver a more personalised offer to those people who need the most support to improve their health and wellbeing.”
The consultation runs from Monday 30 January to Sunday 16 April. You can have your say by taking part in the survey here.